What’s the Frequency, Donald?

 

 

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR >

I gave up long ago on the utility of psychoanalyzing Trump. His pathologies seem so all-encompassing and theatrical as to defy interpretation, even by anti-analysts like RD Laing and Thomas Szasz. But watching Trump in quick succession at the Kirk memorial, the Tylenol press conference and the UN General Assembly, he seemed like a personality in the midst of physical and mental breakdown. Not a crackup, so much as a kind of psychological entropy that is finally beginning to splinter a subject that it’s pawed and scratched the surface of for decades.

The body slumps. The face sags. The loose skin of the throat droops over the collar and onto the tie. The voice speaks in unnatural cadences that don’t harmonize with the often slurred words it tries to pronounce. The volume rises and falls: a blurt, a grunt, a pneumatic whisper. Many of the sentences die out in mid-stream. Others don’t seem to end. More and more often, the thoughts refuse to connect and the voice ends up talking in circles or figure eights. Only the bluster still breaks through. Here’s a narcissist staring into a cracked mirror, no longer sure he’s still in love with the only thing he’s ever really loved: his own image. The mind seems frightened by shadows. Everything is conspiring against him: wife, escalator,  Secret Service, teleprompter, ghost of Epstein. Of course, as the Pretenders sang, “It’s a thin line between love and hate.”

Hate is the dominant theme. It spreads through everything Trump says, like the venom of a pit viper. And not just the political hate for his enemies, who he sees behind every corner, that he bragged about at Kirk’s funeral or the person hate that he’s incubated all his life for immigrants, blacks, independent women, academics, Europeans, trans people and greens. But the deeper hate, the hate that is eating him up from the inside and is now showing in his face, his blackening hand, his bent posture, his precarious gait, his tremulous voice, his fraying memory, for the fact that he is only liked by people he hates and hated by the people whose approval he’s desired all his life. His hatred has become self-consuming.